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Today I ran across a post talking about using Amazon’s EC2 service as a VPN to secure your wireless connection when on a public wi-fi. I read through the how-to and figured I’d write up my much easier and quicker way of doing basically the same thing, plus I think it maybe a bit cheaper.

Create a EC2 instance, you don’t need anything fancy just the very basic.

After you’ve created a EC2 instance and downloaded your key pairs setup your ssh tunnel on your system by doing the following:

Under the Sessions section put the default user name for you EC2 instance followed by the EC2 instance URL in the “Host Name” section. (exp. ubuntu@ec2-75-101-174-10.compute-1.amazonaws.com)

Click and expand the “SSH” section and click on the “Auth” section

Under the “Auth” section click the “Browse…” button under the “Authentication parameters” and find the key pair that you converted to a ppk file using PuTTYGen.

Under the “SSH” section click on the “Tunnels” section.

Under the “Source port” input a random port like 7070.

Choose the “Dynamic” radio button and leave the “Auto” radio button selected.

Click back on the “Session” section and under the “Saved Sessions” give your session a name and click the “Save” button.

Now click the “Open” button at the bottom of the window and you should now have a SSH tunnel to your Amazon EC2 instance.

Using the command line SSH:
– Open the tunnel by using a command like this –> ssh -C2qTnN -D [Random Port] ec2-user@[EC2 Instance URL] (exp. ssh -C2qTnN -D 7070 ec2-user@ec2-75-101-174-10.compute-1.amazonaws.com)

Now that you have the tunnel running all you have to do is point your browser/software to use the SOCKS proxy 127.0.0.1:[Random Port You Selected]. (exp. 127.0.0.1:7070)